Cosmin Costean, Product Manager in Limassol, Cyprus
Cosmin is available for hire
Hire Cosmin

Cosmin Costean

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Limassol, Cyprus

Toptal member since January 1, 2020

Bio

An innovative and performance-driven entrepreneur with a passion for tech and business, Cosmin has 15+ years of experience in various roles such as project manager, product manager, business analyst, head of product, and executive director. He has a proven track record of leading products from conceptualization to commercial success. Cosmin's won multiple awards for technological innovation and holds certifications in AI product management, UX research, design thinking, and disruptive strategy.

Project Highlights

Performio EPM
Created an enterprise performance management platform from the ground up based on the balanced scorecard framework.
myCert
Succesfully lead from ideation to go-to-market mycert.com, whose mission was to reduce certificate fraud and automate certificate issuing and identity management in maritime industry.
TUI Lodging Place
I collaborated with my team to create a set of ML tools for the hospitality industry, which brought more than EUR 10 million in annualized returns.

Expertise

  • Agile
  • Business Process Modeling
  • Business Strategy
  • Design Thinking
  • Market Research
  • Product Management
  • Project Management
  • Software as a Service (SaaS)

Work Experience

Product Lead

2024 - PRESENT
Saudia Airlines
  • Led the initiative for building an AI-based internal revenue management system and marketing optimization engine.
  • Released the first POC with extremely good results.
  • Ensured stakeholder and top management communication and buy-in.

Senior Tehnology Product Manager

2023 - 2024
Booking.com
  • Led the team that designed, implemented, and maintained the NoSQL database infrastructure inside Booking.com, serving 50+ teams across the organization.
  • Defined the vision, roadmap, and backlog for a portfolio of on-premise and cloud data solutions based on market research and stakeholders' needs.
  • Collaborated with engineering managers and solution architects to evaluate and implement services and architectures that enable cloud transformation.

Head of Product

2021 - 2023
TUI UK
  • Conceptualized and executed a set of tools alongside my team, which brought more than €10 million in yearly revenue.
  • Managed the team budget of over €2 million annually.
  • Demonstrated expertise in budget management, goal setting, and effectively communicating with the company's board of directors.
  • Created the strategy, objectives, and KPIs for the portfolio products and implemented the processes that sustained the product development.
  • Led a team of 50 engineers, designers, and product managers.

Product Manager

2017 - 2019
SafeBridge
  • Led the Mycert.com product from the conceptual stage to the market. Won two technological innovation awards for a blockchain-based digital certificate issuing system and robot process automation in identity management.
  • Defined and implemented the product strategy and roadmap.
  • Oversaw budgets and processes and managed board relations.
  • Managed the team budget of over €1 million annually.

Founder | Product Manager

2014 - 2017
Smart Solutions Factory
  • Grew the company from 3 to 25 people and more than €400,000 in ARR.
  • Led the company from the initial stages until its acquisition in 2017.
  • Acted as a product manager, leading a distributed team of 10 developers and designers.
  • Conducted market research and communicated with customers to identify and formulate their requirements.
  • Managed the overall strategy, objectives, and budget.

Executive Director

2014 - 2017
Indevra Software
  • Led the company for a €500,000 private investment.
  • Developed the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
  • Created the team and the business processes from scratch.
  • Spearheaded one of the most successful social media initiatives in Romania.

Founder | Consultant

2010 - 2017
Management Solutions Factory
  • Served as either a project manager or business analyst in over 50 implementations of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SAP Business One, Tableau BI, Microsoft Power BI, and QlikView.
  • Involved in business process modeling and optimization for retail, eCommerce, payments, and manufacturing customers.
  • Created RFPs and assessed the impact of technology on business processes.

Project Manager

2006 - 2010
Senior Software
  • Participated in over 20 implementations of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Tableau BI.
  • Involved in business process modeling, optimization, and gap analysis.
  • Trained users on Tableau BI and the sales, marketing, and support modules of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Consultant

2004 - 2006
Julsoft Group
  • Participated in over 10 implementations of ERP, CRM, and WMS solutions.
  • Assisted customers in formalizing financial, commercial, and logistic business processes and gathering business requirements.
  • Involved in data gathering, data analysis, and migration.
  • Trained users and set up, tested, and documented the solutions.

Project History

Performio EPM

Created an enterprise performance management platform from the ground up based on the balanced scorecard framework.

An Enterprise Performance Management application with the mission of helping small and medium business decision processes by formalizing objectives and KPIs, analysing the causal relationship between them, forecast the company's health and monitoring objectives' progress.

myCert

https://www.mycert.com/

Succesfully lead from ideation to go-to-market mycert.com, whose mission was to reduce certificate fraud and automate certificate issuing and identity management in maritime industry.

The new product gained two awards for technological innovations and is widely used in the maritime industry for issuing digital certificates. It consists of a B2B app specialized in issuing and managing digital certificates, a B2C mobile application for receiving and authenticating the certificates and an API service for certificate distribution.

TUI Lodging Place

I collaborated with my team to create a set of ML tools for the hospitality industry, which brought more than EUR 10 million in annualized returns.

TUI Lodging Place is a combination of AI-driven tools like a revenue management system, dynamic distribution, and marketing optimization to increase hotels' profit and occupancy. The tool resulted in a 12.5% increase in RevPAR.

Education

2004 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Economics

The Spiru Haret University - Bucharest, Romania

Certifications

JULY 2023 - PRESENT

IBM Data Science Professional Certificate

IBM

JANUARY 2023 - PRESENT

AI Product Management Specialization

Duke University

JULY 2021 - PRESENT

User Experience Research and Design Specialization

University of Michigan via Coursera

NOVEMBER 2020 - PRESENT

Strategic Management and Innovation

Copenhagen Business School

MARCH 2020 - PRESENT

Mastering Design Thinking

Sloan School of Management online

OCTOBER 2019 - PRESENT

Disruptive Strategy

Harvard Business School Online

OCTOBER 2016 - PRESENT

Balance Scorecard

Strategsys

SEPTEMBER 2016 - PRESENT

Corporate Strategy

EXEC-EDU

JANUARY 2016 - PRESENT

Agile Project Manager

APMG

APRIL 2009 - PRESENT

ITIL (The Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

APMG International

NOVEMBER 2007 - PRESENT

ISO 9001 Lead Auditor

Quasaro

OCTOBER 2007 - PRESENT

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Solutions Specialist

Microsoft

Skills

Tools

Tableau, Board Reporting

Paradigms

Scrum, Agile, Design Thinking

Platforms

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Blockchain

Industry Expertise

Education Technology (Edtech)

Other

Business Strategy, CRM Systems, Performance Management, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Software as a Service (SaaS), Early-stage Startups, Business Processes, Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Customer Analysis, Roadmaps, Digital Product Management, Data Analysis, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Balance Scorecards, Budgeting, Business Process Modeling, ITIL, Product Management, Project Management, User Experience (UX), Market Research, Manufacturing, Retail & Wholesale, Machine Learning, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Travel, Marketing, Social Media, Databases, Cloud Migration, eCommerce, AI Marketing, Data Science

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring